Feature Article

Dell'Oro Group Forecasts 49-Percent Growth in Wireless LAN Market

According to a new report released by Dell’Oro Group, a trusted supplier of market information about the networking and telecommunications industries, overall Wireless LAN market revenue is forecast to exceed $11 billion in 2017 – 49 percent greater than 2012 revenue.

"Today's enterprise applications are now built for mobile devices, enabling workers to be nomadic. The emphasis on mobile devices places new demands on the corporate wireless infrastructure. It also forces companies to maintain connections to employees while they traverse to cellular networks, and drives the need to apply consistent access rules for both Ethernet and wireless access systems," Chris DePuy, vice president at Dell'Oro Group, said in a statement carried by Yahoo Finance.

There are trends predicted to cause this growth, including the deployment of Service Provider Wi-Fi (SP Wi-Fi), the 802.11ac upgrade cycle, cloud-managed WLAN, consumer video over Wi-Fi, and the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend.

"We see continued innovation at the edge of enterprise networks that will drive continued investment in both wireless equipment as well as access management infrastructure," DePuy added.

The report goes into further detail on why the Enterprise segment will grow faster than SOHO, a LAN designed to be used by very small businesses also known as “Small Office / Home Office.”

The piece explains estimates on total SP Wi-Fi units, forecasts revenue and analyzes the cloud-managed addressable market by vertical industry.

"In this day and age, where wireless traffic has really exploded, and you're carrying all kinds of heavy, latency-sensitive wireless traffic like voice and video, routing all the traffic back to a controller adds an exceptionally large amount of overhead on the network, both local area and wide area," Rohit Mehra, vice president of network infrastructure research at IDC, said about Cisco’s recent announcement of its new wireless LAN integrating system.

With many popular wireless LAN suppliers like Communitech and Cisco announcing new changes in the field, it seems like Dell’Oro’s forecast is correct.